The invention concerns an arrangement for transporting recording medium sheets from a printing platen area into a deposit tray such that the individual printed sheets can be optionally stacked in the deposit tray in an upwards or downwards sequence.
Printing device assemblies for conducting recording medium sheets from a printing platen area into a deposit tray are known in the art. One such sheet deposit system for an office printing machine is disclosed in German OS No. 28 56 950. In this system, the sheet to be printed is drawn from a feed box, with the assistance of transport rollers which are driven by the platen and arranged in the conveyance path of the sheet. By means of other transport rollers arranged above the platen, the sheet is then gripped and stacked in a deposit box. In order to allow individual sheets to be deposited, an additional vertical supply shaft is provided in which individual sheets can be inserted which are fed through this additional supply shaft to the input of the platen.
In all sheet transport devices of this kind in which the data carriers are withdrawn from a feed box and transported via the platen to a deposit tray or box, the problem exists that the order of the sheets stacked in the boxes is reversed. This means that the uppermost sheet of the data carriers stacked in the feed box finds itself as the bottom sheet in the deposit box at the end of the printing process. The depositing of individual sheets in deposit boxes where the first printed sheet occupies the lowest position at the end of the printing process will be referred to hereafter as upwards sequence depositing. If the individual sheets are deposited in such manner that, viewed from the printing area, the uppermost sheet in the deposit box stack corresponds to the first individual sheet to have been printed by the printer during the printing process, this will hereafter be referred to as downwards sequence depositing.
An object of the invention is to provide printers with a printed sheet deposit device which allows the individual sheets to be deposited optionally in upwards sequence or in downwards sequence.